The Blackstone Charitable Foundation is granting $3 million over five years to establish a partnership to promote entrepreneurship among students at Temple University and Philadelphia University.

The grant will fund the establishment of centers on the universities’ campuses that are modeled after a center that the University of Miami opened in 2008. The centers will promote entrepreneurship as a career option and try to provide students with the skills, knowledge and guidance to turn ideas into businesses.

The University City Science Center also will be involved in the partnership to help the universities work together and be sure they have the resources they need for the centers.

The Blackstone Charitable Foundation expects to have the centers up and running in the spring semester of 2013.

The foundation was created by The Blackstone Group LP when the New York-based alternative-asset-management and financial-advisory-services firm went public in 2007.

After the economy crashed in 2008, Blackstone decided to have the foundation focus on promoting entrepreneurship and job creation.

“We felt that given our area of specialization, which is the investment business, that we should take our skills and do what we thought would be best for society,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman, Blackstone’s co-founder, chairman and CEO, who grew up in Abington.

The University of Miami’s center, which is called The Launch Pad, grew out of a discussion among the deans of its nine undergraduate schools about the career center of the future.

“They all said things like, ‘We have seniors who are coming to us and they want to start ventures and we need to help them learn how to do that,’” said William Scott Green, Miami’s senior vice provost and dean of undergraduate education.

Students who want to work with The Launch Pad fill out an application to join its community. Once they’re accepted, they fill out a venture-assessment form that details their idea for a business and the resources they think will be necessary to get it off the ground. The plans that are considered viable are referred to the Venture Coaching Program, a group of local business leaders who have volunteered to work with Launch Pad students.

Since The Launch Pad’s inception, joining it has become the most popular student activity on Miami’s campus. More than 2,400 students have worked with it, submitting nearly 1,300 venture-assessment forms and starting 85 companies that have created 210 jobs.

That track record led Blackstone to decide to make replicating The Launch Pad in other areas of the country its charitable focus.

In 2010, it launched The Blackstone LaunchPad Program at Wayne State University and Walsh College in Detroit. As of June, the LaunchPads on those two campuses had gotten more than 265 venture-assessment forms and helped start or expand 64 companies, creating 100 jobs in the process.

Earlier this year, Blackstone, in partnership with The Burton D. Morgan Foundation, brought the program to a community college and three universities in Northeast Ohio: Lorain Community College and Kent State, Baldwin-Wallace and Case Western Reserve universities.

That was the first of five regions to which Blackstone committed expanding the program as part of its participation in the White House’s Startup America Partnership.

Philadelphia is the second. Blackstone chose the area in part because it felt it had a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem in place for The LaunchPad program to build off of.

Philadelphia University President Stephen Spinelli Jr. agrees.

“I’ve spent most of my time in Boston, which is a real hub for entrepreneurial activity and I think Philadelphia is a real diamond in the rough and I think less rough and more diamond,” said Spinelli, who co-founded Jiffy Lube Inc. and became its largest franchisee before turning to academia.

Blackstone selected the universities and the Science Center to participate in LaunchPad based on their responses to requests for proposals it put out earlier this year.

It encouraged Temple to apply to be part of the program, said Jaine Lucas, the executive director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute, which is part of Temple’s Fox School of Business.

The center established by the LaunchPad program will take over the duties of coaching students in entrepreneurship from the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute.

That will enable Temple to do a better job promoting entrepreneurship to students in all its 17 schools, Lucas said.

“I believe the number of undergraduates that we will be able to serve will double and double quickly,” she said.